Serendipity35

Classroom google.com/edu/classroom is a new, free tool in the Google Apps for Education suite. It helps teachers create and organize assignments, provide feedback and communicate with their classes.

I have had the feeling for at least a year that Google is planning to move in a much bigger way into education, especially higher education.

This new tool lets teachers create assignments, share a single document or automatically make a copy for each student. You can see who has or hasn't completed the work and provide direct feedback. Of course, it is tied into all the other Google Apps. For example, it automatically creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students can see what’s due on their Assignments page.

Currently, it is available for teachers at all levels, but you need to apply for a preview of Classroom. I did awhile back, but no preview yet. Classroom will be available to any school using Google Apps for Education by September.

I still think that the real online Google Classroom is yet to come. We will be hosting our online courses in a free Google LMS one day. Look out Blackboard, Canvas and all the rest.

May and June are the months for "professional development" in higher education. We try to grab faculty before they go into full summer vacation mode (or get wrapped up in summer classes and research).

I taught a session at the Faculty Institute at NJIT and last week another one on writing at Georgian Court University and today I am at at New Jersey City University. Their Academic Computing group and the Center for Teaching and Learning, in collaboration with the Office of Grants and Sponsored Programs, is hosting their first Summer Faculty Institute on Learning Technologies. The three-day institute is a time to connect with colleagues, guest speakers, and to get hands-on practice with new technologies.

I will be one of the keynote speakers. My talk - "I Have A Theory About Learning" - will hopefully give the faculty a number of ways to think about learning theories that are emerging from current technologies. I know that some of those theories will be developed further in hands-on sessions offered during the three days.

Craig Kapp is another keynote. He is  an interactive developer that I have seen before demonstrating some really interesting tech he has developed. I first met him when he was in Instructional Technology at TCNJ.  Now, he's at New York University as a Researcher in Residence at the Interactive Telecommunications Program. His company is ZooBurst, a web-based start-up that focuses on bringing augmented reality digital storytelling tools into classrooms around the world.

Eric Sheninger is the third day keynote. I have not met him before but know of him and follow him on social media. Eric is a Principal at New Milford High School in NJ, but he is known for his work on leading and learning in the digital age. Pillars of Digital Leadership is a framework for educators to initiate sustainable change to transform school cultures.His book is Digital Leadership: Changing Paradigms for Changing Times.

I will also be doing a longer workshop session on bringing Open Educational Resources (OER) into courses. The good thing about having two hours in a workshop setting is that rather than just try to sell faculty on using something like open textbooks or open courseware, we can actually look at sites that offer them and try to find some resources that work for their classes.

Too often professional development sessions give faculty good ideas to use, but then they have to leave and do the work of designing to implement those ideas. And that's where the model breaks down.

One idea in my opening talk is that with all the talk about "flipping the classroom" I would like to hear more about flipping the teacher and flipping professional development/learning.   I think that professional development would be more effective if some of it was done online and on-your-own prior to going to any face-to-face session. Get the theory out of the way and use the synchronous time to do the work and application.

The other NJCU sessions will be looking at how to use Personal Learning Networks, flipping the classroom, lecture capture, augmented reality,
data visualization and mobile devices, assistive technology for faculty and students, clickers for class and online polling, social media technologies as tools to engage college student, and robots in education for STEM and NAO.

Big data is a big topic in business and is moving into education more and more.  At the New Jersey Institute of Technology where I work, there is a certificate program in this area.

I knew this a decade ago as "data mining" and recently I see the term "thick data" being used. As far as I can tell (the term isn't even in Wikipedia yet), that term is taken from other fields, including anthropology. A "thick" description of a human behavior is one that explains not just the behavior, but its context as well, such that the behavior becomes meaningful to an outsider. Thick data is taking big data and giving it context.

I am giving a presentation at the New Jersey Writing Alliance Spring (NJWA) Conference this week on my experiences teaching technical writing this year at New Jersey Institute of Technology and at Montclair State University. NJIT is NJ's science and technology university and MSU is the state's second-largest comprehensive university.

Although the two schools are seen as quite different, the approach I take to technical writing is very similar. My presentation is on "Technical Writing Across Disciplines" and will examine how a technical writing course can emphasize a research approach and problem solving that is not like most of the academic writing done in other writing classes.
One thing I enjoy about the NJWA conference is that it has presenters and attendees from both K-12 and higher education. That doesn't occur often enough.

Keeping with the conference theme of "Achieving College-Ready Writing: The Common Core and Beyond," I'll also examine how secondary school teachers can teach writing about science and technical subjects. That is a strand of the English Language Arts Standards that are part of the controversial Common Core State Standards Initiative as adopted in NJ and other states.